What is the process for writing a thesis for graduate work? Specifically, I’m interested in learning how a thesis can be rejected and prevent one from earning a master’s degree.
It’s my understanding that a graduate works with an adviser to come up with an idea, does their own research, and then has to submit the thesis and defend it.
Is there a situation where a completed thesis would be rejected for security reasons? IE, it’s so good we don’t want to give the terrorists ideas?
I know this sounds odd, but I recently heard someone give this as a reason for not graduating with a masters, and I was a bit :dubious:
I have an M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and completed a thesis some years ago.
In technical fields (which is all that I am familiar with), graduate students very rarely come up with an independent idea for their thesis. Basically, you either choose or get assigned to a faculty advisor, and you work for them. They will tell you what they are working on (and what they have funding to support, usually through grants), and you pick a topic to work on. A graduate student’s thesis work is typically part of the professor’s overall research interests (i.e. you are building on work conducted by the prof’s previous grad student, and subsequent grad students will build on your work).
My first proposed thesis topic lost funding, so I had to switch to a completely different topic. (Fortunately, I hadn’t gotten done much work yet. Also, I wasn’t all that disappointed, because that first topic didn’t particularly interest me.)
So anyway, after you pick an advisor and a topic, you put together a thesis proposal. You then ask 4-5 professors (including your advisor, and usually one prof from outside of your department) to serve on your thesis committee. You get approvals to proceed from your committee and the Dean of the graduate school, then start work.
After the work is completed, you write your thesis. The thesis is submitted in draft form to your committee a few weeks before your public defense. A thesis defense is basically an oral exam. At the end of your defense, your committee votes (in closed session while you fret in the hallway); then they call you back in and tell you if you passed or not. You then get handed a form signed by the committee with the precise disposition. Possible outcomes are: (1) Passed with no revisions necessary; (2) Passed with the following minor revisions to your thesis; (3) Passed with the following major revisions (might even involve more research); (4) Failed.
Most common is outcome #2 or #3 above. I got a very rare outcome #1.
I had an acquaintance who got a #3 which included additional research needed. He didn’t take it well, and told his committee to shove it. :smack: I think he later transferred to another institution, and ended up repeating most of his M.S.
Sounds like B.S. to me, too. If the topic was that sensitive, it would either be classified (and the person would be at an institution like the Naval War College), or would never be approved back at the proposal stage.
That’s what I thought…the idea would be rejected right from the get-go, not that the student wouldn’t be allowed to present/publish it and that lost them the degree.
Hot, Steaming. Grade-A BS (and not Bachelor of Science B.S.).
First of all, for a Masters, my guess is the majority are awarded either from 2-3 year professional programs where theses are either not done or optional, or as ‘consolation prizes’ for people dropping out of PhD programs after completing classwork but before finishing their PdD thesis. Even where a Masters program requires a thesis, it’s not a huge years-long original research project, but generally just a glorified term paper (remember, it’s only a two year program most likely, including all the coursework). And while PhD theses generally have to be submitted to a library/archive, that’s almost never the case with Masters.
Second, if a thesis was somehow too sensitive to publish, that means it’s way good enough to justify getting a Masters. The program would either have the student revise it until it is publishable, accept it but not make it publicly available, or figure out a way to give the student their degree without having to formally accept and publish the thesis.
Just put everything that person says into the category of “I’m not exactly saying it’s a lie, but I’m not doing anything that depends on it being true, either”, until proven otherwise.
Total bullshit. As robby says, the thesis adviser and committee would be reviewing progress at several stages. If the material was overly sensitive the student would be steered away from it. And a thesis wouldn’t be rejected for being too sensitive. If fulfilled requirements, the student would get the degree but the thesis might be classified. (Though that seems more like the kind of thing that would happen in a movie rather than real life.)
I earned my MBA a few years back (it was a professional program, not full time) and I didn’t have to write a thesis. There’s been a couple of things off about this individual that have come to light in the last couple of years, and my BS meter, she is pinging.
If a thesis is going to be “rejected” wholesale, this is where it should happen.
Even after you have an approved proposal there are a number of ways a grad student can sink his/her thesis, but they require some pretty egregious behavior. [ul]
[li]You can write a thesis on something other than the already-approved topic - a student in grad school with me did this, and she was stunned to learn that her committee wouldn’t accept it.[/li][li]You can butt heads with your adviser to the point where the adviser won’t let you defend. This might just be shoddy work, but it could also be a student refusing to perform “unnecessary” experiments or analyses that the adviser requires, refusing to edit text, etc. Ultimately, you’re not going anywhere unless your adviser signs off.[/li][li]Very rarely you’ll see a student whose adviser allows the defense but whose committee doesn’t approve the thesis. This looks bad for everybody, from the student to the entire department, and everybody tries to avoid this kind of situation. [/li][li]Plagiarism discovered prior to acceptance of the completed thesis.[/li][/ul]
The common theme in all these instances, though, is a stubborn student trying to pass off sub-par work (or somebody else’s work) to get a degree.
There are a handful of instances where technical PhD thesis have been classified or denied because they pertained directly to critical defense related technologies. (The same is true for a handful of patent applications, since patents have to be published publically in order to be enforceable). In such cases, the classified data or information in the thesis can typically be put into a classified annex provided the school in question has the ability to handle and store classified materials (many schools like MIT and Georgia Tech have associated labs that frequently work on defense-related programs) and a qualified thesis review committee which can review the thesis in a SCIF.
However, all of the specific instances I know of offhand occurred in the 'Eighties or earlier (most were associated with directed energy weapons or nuclear weapon phenomena), so it’s pretty hard to accientially research your way into an area of information that would be considered classified, especially since there is a lot of pressure to publish research as early and often as possible. A thesis for a master’s degree doesn’t generally go into enough depth to be worthy of secure classification unless it is starting with classified data to begin with. The only way I could see someone having a master’s thesis that was considered Secret or above is if it specifically pertained to strategic defense strategy. In any case, I would assume a school would find a way to allow substitute work or otherwise issue a degree in such a case unless there were additional politics or problems involved.
Note that it is possible in some cases to take publically available information and put it together in a way that would be considered classified. However, if you are a private citizen who doesn’t already carry a security clearance, I don’t think there is any legal recourse for the government to penalize you for doing so unless it violates the International Traffic in Arms Regulations or could outright be interpreted as espionage, sabotage, or otherwise aiding and abetting a foreign interest against the United States. For someone holding a security clearance, putting that kind of information together or even reviewing and commenting on it could be a violation and may be cause to revoke the clearance (depending on which government agency controls the clearance and what their specific rules are) and potentially criminal prosecution if done willfully or in gross negligence.
My graduate work was done in a hybrid lib arts/tech field (NLP as part of a linguistics program), and yes, that’s how it happened. Idea with advisor, go do research and write it. For a Master’s there was no defense; the advisor just had to say “Yep, good enough.” For the Master’s thesis to be rejected would just be a case of the advisor saying “Nope, not good enough, try again.”
Agree with everyone that your acquaintance’s story is BS.
Agree, total BS. At my school, a master’s thesis is a glorified term paper. If a student did something classifiable, who would know it before it was published. Yes, the defense department tried to classify the RSA encryption algorithm after the basic idea was published by Martin Gardner in Scientific American. (They claimed the implementation details were not obvious from Gardner’s description. That was fatuous.) They went so far as to ban foreigners from coming to number theory conferences in the US.
But what I wanted to say is that in my department, no one but the advisor ever looked at a master’s thesis. A PhD thesis is dealt with more seriously. They are sent out to an “external examiner” and also to an “internal examiner” who might or might not be the advisor. Assuming the examiners are basically happy, the final exam committee is struck and the student examined. I have not heard of a failure at that stage. But my question is, at what stage would somebody decide this is too dangerous? Who has this authority.
At any rate, assuming the thesis is basically acceptable, it would not be rejected, although I suppose it could be classified.
My master’s program had either a thesis option, or non-thesis option with a “special project” and additional coursework. I initially picked the non-thesis option, but my special project grew in scope until it essentially had become a thesis.
Midway through my research project, my advisor talked me into switching to the thesis option – after I had completed the additional coursework! – and actually paid for the additional credit hours required for a thesis out of his grant money. As he put it, you have to write a paper for the project anyway; a thesis isn’t much more work. (That last statement was completely untrue, BTW. Writing that thesis was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.)
Because of the late switch, I actually assembled my committee and made my thesis proposal near the end of my research. That part was low stress…I figured if I got any push-back, I would switch back to the non-thesis option.
Anyway, my thesis ended up being considerably longer than a “glorified term paper” (but still nothing like a Ph.D. dissertation). It was about a hundred pages long (though a lot of that consisted of appendices and graphs). It was in fact submitted to my department archive and the university library. In fact, I ran into a colleague a few years later who did a master’s thesis on a topic similar to mine at a different university, and she had actually cited my thesis!
After graduation, my advisor wanted me to modify my thesis and submit it for publication in a journal, but I got too busy getting out of the Navy, looking for a job, moving, and starting the new job, so I never got around to it. (He was also trying to talk me into continuing the research for a Ph.D. program, which I was not interested in.) My advisor did cite my thesis in a paper that he wrote, though.
See this story about an undergraduate who created a workable design for an atomic bomb back in the 1970s: John Aristotle Phillips - Wikipedia - he got an “A” in the course, not a “we can’t pass you because of security.”
It actually happened to John Aristotle Phillips, who researched publicly available information to write a senior thesis (not even an MS thesis) on building an atomic bomb. His faculty adviser, Freeman Dyson, was skeptical that enough information would be available publicly for him to succeed. There is some disagreement among physicists as to whether Phillip’s design would actually work, but it was sufficient to cause the FBI to confiscate his paper and models.
Phillips published a very entertaining book about his experiences, entitled *Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid. *One reason the book is so entertaining is that Phillips was NOT a great student; his paper was a rather desperate, albeit ultimately successful, attempt to keep from flunking out.
I met Phillips, who now owns a software company, at a conference some years back. He was surprised to hear that I had read his book; apparently no one else at the conference had done so.
Doesn’t the military sometimes send officers to get master’s degrees? Maybe if you’re a nuclear engineer and you need a master’s degree for your career path, and your masters is on some sort of nuclear stuff that might end up classified. Or computer/communication security.
But note that your master’s thesis would have to involve something pretty special for the government to want to keep it secret.
Reminds me a bit of the “radioactive Boy Scout” case, in which a 17 year old kid attempted to build a breeder nuclear reactor in his parent’s backyard shed after earning an “atomic energy” merit badge.
:dubious:
